culminating on the 4th May with the famous Chicago meeting where the bomb was thrown which led to the hanging of four Anarchists. In London the police supervision of the meetings was sufficient to prevent any violence until Monday, 8th February 1886, when a Sugar Bounty meeting was held in Trafalgar Square. It was swamped by a huge crowd of the unemployed. The Federation orators, who were present, seized the opportunity to hold a counter demonstration ; after which there was an adjournment to Hyde Park. Unfortunately, on this occasion the police, through some blunder in telephoning or the like, received orders to proceed, not to Pall Mall, but to The Mall. Accordingly, they were shivering in St. James's Park whilst the unemployed were passing through the street of rich men's clubs. The rich men crowded to the windows to see the poor men pass along; and Dives, not noticing the absence of the police, mocked Lazarus. Lazarus thereupon broke Dives's windows, and even looted a shop or two, besides harmlessly storming the carriage of a tactless lady near the Achilles statue. Hyndman, Champion, Burns and Williams were arrested and tried for this affair; but there were one or two good men on the jury, notably a Christian Socialist named Crickmay; our friend Sparling was proved by himself and others to have used the most terrible of the phrases for which Burns was indicted; and what with these advantages and the unimpeachable gentility of two of the defendants, all four were acquitted. This was a great success, especially as the Mansion House Fund for the relief of the unemployed had gone up with a bound from £30,000 to £79,000 after the window breaking. The agitation went on more violently than ever afterwards; and the restless activity of Champion, seconded by Burns's formidable oratory, seized on every public opportunity, from the Lord Mayor's Show to services for the poor in Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's, to parade the unemployed and force their claims upon the attention of the public. A commercial firm attempted to make a census of the unemployed in order to advertize themselves; the Pall Mall Gazette tried also; and matters looked very gloomy indeed when Champion, impatient of doing nothing but marching hungry men about the streets and making stale speeches to them, offered the Federation the alternative of either empowering him to negotiate some scheme of relief with his aristocratic sympathizers, or else going to Trafalgar Square and staying there day and night until something should happen-the something being perhaps the best available attempt at a revolution possible under the circumstances. The Federation refused both alternatives; and Champion withdrew from the agitation in disgust. A long-brewing dissension between Burns and Hyndman also came to a head about this time; and the result was that the unemployed agitation was left almost leaderless at the moment when the unemployed themselves were getting most desperate. Early in the winter of 1887 the men themselves, under all sorts of casual leaders, or rather speechmakers, took to meeting constantly in Trafalgar Square, thus taking up Champion's alternative for want of anything else to do. Champion, however,

was gone; and the shopkeepers began to complain that the sensational newspaper accounts of the meetings were frightening away their customers and endangering the Christmas quarter's rent. On this the newspapers became more sensational than ever; and those fervid orators who preserve friendly relations with the police began to throw in the usual occasional proposal to set London on fire simultaneously at the Bank, St. Paul's, the House of Commons, the Stock Exchange, and the Tower. This helped to keep the pot boiling; and at last the police cleared the unemployed out of the Square. Immediately the whole working-class political organization of London rallied to the defence of the right of meeting. The affair of 1866, when the railings of Hyde Park were thrown down and the right of meeting there vindicated, and the Free Speech triumph at Dod Street, were precedents in favor of the people. The papers which declared that the workers had an excellent forum in Hyde Park without obstructing Trafalgar Square, were reminded that in 1866 the convenience of Trafalgar Square for public meetings was made an excuse for the attempt to put down meetings in the Park. Mr. Stead, who was then editing the Pall Mall Gazette, and who, with all his enthusiasm, had about as much practical knowledge of how to do the Dod Street trick* as a London tram-conductor has of conducting classical concerts, gave the word "To the Square!" To the Square we all went, therefore, with drums beating and banners waving, in our tens of thousands, nominally to protest against the Irish policy of the Government, but really to maintain the right of meeting in the Square. The meeting had been proclaimed; but the authority cited was an Act for the Regulation of Traffic which clearly gave no power to the police to prohibit processions, and which was abandoned by the Government when they had to justify their action in court. However, the new Chief Commissioner of Police, successor to him who had been dismissed for making that mistake in the previous year about Pall Mall, had no notion of sharing his predecessor's fate. He took no half measures in the matter: there was no reading of the Riot Act, or calling on the processions to disperse, as they had arranged to do peacefully and constitutionally if so ordered. It was, as one of Bunyan's pilgrims put it, but word and a blow with him; for the formal summons to disperse was

• It may be useful to say here that "the way to do the Dod Street trick" is simply to find a dozen or more persons who are willing to get arrested at the rate of one per week by speaking in defiance of the police. In a month or two, the repeated arrests, the crowds which they attract, the scenes which they provoke, the sentences passed by the magistrates and at the sessions, and the consequent newspaper descriptions, rouse sufficient public feeling to force the Home Secretary to give way whenever the police are clearly in the wrong. Mr. Matthews, victorious in Trafalgar Square, has been completely beaten at the World's End, Chelsea, by this method since the above paper was read. The method, however, is extremely hard on the martyrs, who suffer severely, and get no compensation, and but little thanks.

accompanied by a vigorous baton charge, before which the processionists, though, outnumbering their assailants by a hundred to one, fled in the utmost confusion and terror. That eventful 13th November 1887 has since been known as "Bloody Sunday." The heroes of it were Burns and Cunninghame Graham, who charged, two strong, at the rampart of policemen round the Square and were overpowered and arrested. The heroine was Mrs. Besant, who may be said without the slightest exaggeration to have all but killed herself with overwork in looking after the prisoners, and organizing on their behalf a "Law and Liberty League" with Mr. Stead. Meanwhile the police received the blessing of Mr. Gladstone; and Insurrectionism, after a two years' innings, vanished from the field and has not since been much heard of. For, in the middle of the revengeful growling over the defeat at the Square, trade revived; the unemployed were absorbed; the Star newspaper appeared to let in light and let off steam: in short, the way was clear at last for Fabianism. Do not forget, though, that Insurrectionism will reappear at the next depression of trade as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow morning.*

The Fabian Conference of 1886.

You will now ask to be told what the Fabians had been doing all this time. Well, I think it must be admitted that we were overlooked in the excitements of the unemployed agitation, which had, moreover, caused the Tory money affair to be forgotten. The Fabians were disgracefully backward in open-air speaking. Up to quite a recent date, Graham Wallas, myself, and Mrs. Besant were the only representative open-air speakers in the Society, whereas the Federation speakers, Burns, Hyndman, Andrew Hall, Tom Mann, Champion, Burrows, with the Socialist Leaguers, were at it constantly. On the whole, the Church Parades and the rest were not in our line; and we were not wanted by the men who were organizing them. Our only contribution to the agitation was a report which we printed in 1886, which recommended experiments in tobaccoculture, and even hinted at compulsory military service, as means of absorbing some of the unskilled unemployed, but which went carefully into the practical conditions of relief works. Indeed, we are at present trying to produce a new tract on the subject without finding ourselves able to improve very materially on the old one in this respect. It was drawn up by Bland, Hughes, Podmore, Stapelton, and Webb, and was the first of our publications that contained any solid information. Its tone, however, was moderate and its style somewhat conventional; and the Society was still in so hot a temper on the

This is the sentence which led a London evening newspaper (The Echo) to denounce the author in unmeasured terms for inciting the unemployed to armed rebellion. The incident is worth mentioning as an example of the ordinary Press criticism of Socialist utterances.

social question that we refused to adopt it as regular Fabian tract, and only issued it as a report printed for the information of members. Nevertheless we were coming to our senses rapidly by this time. We signalized our repudiation of political sectarianism in June, 1886, by inviting the Radicals, the Secularists, and anyone else who would come, to a great conference, modelled upon the Industrial Remuneration Conference, and dealing with the Nationalization of Land and Capital. It fully established the fact that we had nothing immediately practical to impart to the Radicals and that they had nothing to impart to us. The proceedings were fully reported for us; but we never had the courage even to read the shorthand writer's report, which still remains in MS. Before I refreshed my memory on the subject the other day, I had a vague notion that the Conference cost a great deal of money; that it did no good whatever; that Mr. Bradlaugh made a speech; that Mrs. Fenwick Miller, who had nothing on earth to do with us, was in the chair during part of the proceedings; and that the most successful paper was by a strange gentleman whom we had taken on trust as a Socialist, but who turned out to be an enthusiast on the subject of building more harbors. I find, however, on looking up the facts, that no less than fifty-three societies sent delegates; that the guarantee fund for expenses was £100; and that the discussions were kept going for three afternoons and three evenings. The Federation boycotted us; but the Times reported us. Eighteen papers were read, two of them by members of Parliament, and most of the rest by well-known people. William Morris and Dr. Aveling read papers as delegates from the Socialist League; the National Secular Society sent Mr. Foote and Mr. Robertson, the latter contributing a "Scheme of Taxation" in which he anticipated much of what was subsequently adopted as the Fabian program; Wordsworth Donisthorpe took the field for Anarchism of the type advocated by the authors of "A Plea for Liberty"; Stewart Headlam spoke for Christian Socialism and the Guild of St. Matthew; Dr. Pankhurst dealt with the situation from the earlier Radical point of view; and various Socialist papers were read by Mrs. Besant, Sidney Webb, and Edward Carpenter, besides one by Stuart Glennie, who subsequently left us because we fought shy of the Marriage Question when revising our "Basis." I mention all this in order to shew you how much more important this abortive Conference looked than the present one. Yet all that can be said for it is that it made us known to the Radical clubs and proved that we were able to manage a conference in a businesslike way. It also, by the way, shewed off our pretty prospectus with the design by Crane at the top, our stylish-looking blood-red invitation cards, and the other little smartnesses on which we then prided ourselves. We used to be plentifully sneered at as fops and armchair Socialists for our attention to these details; but I think it was by no means the least of our merits that we always, as far as our means permitted, tried to make our printed documents as handsome as possible, and did

our best to destroy the association between revolutionary literature and slovenly printing on paper that is nasty without being cheap. One effect of this was that we were supposed to be much richer than we really were, because we generally got better value and ♣ finer show for our money than the other Socialist societies.

The Fabian Parliamentary League.

The Conference was the last of our follies. We had now a very strong Executive Committee, including Mrs. Besant, who in June 1885 had effected her public profession of Socialism by joining the Fabian. Five out of the seven authors of "Fabian Essays," which were of course still unwritten, were at the helm by 1887. But by 1886 we had already found that we were of one mind as to the advisability of setting to work by the ordinary political methods and having done with Anarchism and vague exhortations to Emancipate the Workers. We had several hot debates on the subject with a section of the Socialist League which called itself Anti-State Communist, a name invented by Mr. Joseph Lane of that body. William Morris, who was really a free democrat of the Kropotkin type, backed up Lane, and went for us tooth and nail. Records of our warfare may be found in the volumes of the extinct magazine called To-Day, which was then edited by Hubert Bland; and they are by no means bad reading. We soon began to see that at the debates the opposition to us came from members of the Socialist League, who were present only as visitors. The question was, how many followers had our one ascertained Anarchist, Mrs. Wilson, among the silent Fabians. Bland and Mrs. Besant brought this question to an issue on the 17th September, 1886, at a meeting in Anderton's Hotel, by respectively seconding and moving the follow ing resolution:

"That it is advisable that Socialists should organize themselves as a political party for the purpose of transferring into the hands of the whole working community full control over the soil and the means of production, as well as over the production and distribution of wealth."

To this a rider was moved by William Morris as follows:

"But whereas the first duty of Socialists is to educate the people to understand what their present position is, and what their future might be, and to keep the principle of Socialism steadily before them; and whereas no Parliamentary party can exist without compromise and concession, which would hinder that education and obscure those principles, it would be a false step for Socialists to attempt to take part in the Parliamentary contest."

I shall not attempt to describe the debate, in which Morris, Mrs. Wilson, Davis, and Tochatti did battle with Burns, Mrs. Besant, Bland, Shaw, Donald, and Rossiter: that is, with Fabian and S.D.F.